Reasons to use PHP

I love "x reasons to y" because the point-by-point rebuttals are so fun to write. Here we go!

PHP is stupid easy to scale

So is every other programming language. The hard part is scaling your centralized database. Considering most people using PHP are writing applications backed by a single SQL database, it's a bit disingenuous to call the language "shared nothing". While true, it's completely meaningless and true of literally every programming language ever.

It's like saying, "English makes it really easy to tell love stories."

I won’t need experts – If the event that my new ventures grow and I need to hire on more programmers I do not need the best and brightest to get the job done.

True of any language. I can hire people that are bad at programming any language, cheaply.

The deeper problem is that PHP makes it tough to multiply effort by creating good abstractions, so there is a lot of repetitive grunt-work that's best outsourced to a country where people are happy making five bucks an hour.

It is tied to the web

"PHP doesn't work very well when not serving web pages, so I use it to serve web pages." The tautology department called, they want their tautology department back.

When it fails, it doesn’t fail hard

I am not sure what this means. Each request is handled by a single UNIX process. That's, again, how the author happens to architect applications, not an intrinsic (or unique) property of PHP.

Other languages need a lot of plumbing to handle that.

Citation needed. This is standard CGI that's been around since the 80s.

There are a plethora of frameworks to chose from

That's fine. Again true of any language. Even Common Frickin' Lisp has several frameworks.

Best documentation on the web

The author does not explain why, only that he wishes he could log in with his Twitter account to propose changes. (What ever happened to emailing the author?)

Tons of blogs

True of everything, from programming languages to pictures of cats.

The PHP Community

True of pretty much every language I've ever encountered. Even C.

I like the Perl community best because of the infrastructure that the members build for each other. Want to get an email when your module's tests fail on HP-UX? Someone has built a service for that.

Answering questions is nice, but that's the tip of the community iceberg.

It integrates with everything

I read this as: "PHP has a socket API."

Dynamic typing

I'm just going to quote this one verbatim because I can't come up with anything more hilarious:

“But how do you know if you’re working with an int or a string?” By using your brain. HTTP does not do typing and so PHP does not do (strong) typing for scalars. Quite frankly, it makes complete sense to do it that way. Want an int? Cast the damn thing and stop complaining. Dynamic typing significantly reduces the amount of code you need to write and error conditions you need to check for. It plain works – Programmer’s have it wrong. The technical solution is not the end goal. Technology should be an enabler. Do you have a wonderful technical solution that doesn’t solve a problem? Bye, bye. PHP solves problems faster, easier and with a lower cost of ownership than almost anything out there. A lot of that is based on “assumptions” (or shortcuts) that PHP takes to solve a problem. Most often those shortcuts work, and the workarounds are very easy to implement (I’m thinking mainly about strict type checking here).

Little does the author know that you can have dynamic typing in any statically-typed language:

   /** Immutable scalar value. */
   public final class Scalar {

       private final Integer intValue;  // not int so that "null" is meaningful
       private final String stringValue;

       public Scalar(String string) {
           stringValue = string;
       }

       public Scalar(int i) {
           intValue = new Integer(i);
       }

       public String toString() {
           if (stringValue == null) {
               fixupString();
           }
           return stringValue;
       }

       public int toInt() {
           if (intValue == null) {
               fixupInteger();
           }
           return intValue.intValue();
       }

       private void fixupString() {
           stringValue = intValue.toString();
       }

       private void fixupInteger() {
           intValue = Integer.parseInt(stringValue);
       }
    }

All PHP adds are operators like + that are typed Scalar -> Scalar instead of Number -> Number, making up arbitrary behavior for non-numeric values. If you wanted dynamic typing in Java, you would just write a special math library over your Scalar type and write your application in terms of those operations instead of the built-in ones. The reason nobody does that is because the static typing, though verbose, makes for nice self-documentation.

At some point you need to decide on a type for a value and most people try to do that as soon as possible. When I write in a dynamically typed language that's not Python, I usually assert well-formedness immediately after reading the data from outside my program. At that point, dynamic typing is a loss in safety to me. (When I write Python, I never explicitly check types and let mistyped operations fail at runtime, because that's the convention.)

Anyway, that was a fun article.

1. The same is true of share-nothing architectures in Ruby, Python, Perl, Java, or C# (including Rails and Django). All you have to do is get more app servers - no fuss. Of course, the hard thing is scaling the data store which is something PHP (or other language) users will still face.

2. I don't think PHP is any easier than Python or Ruby - in fact, in many ways I consider it more difficult personally. There may be a higher number of people that advertise PHP skills, but many of them are people that can cut and paste and keep futzing until something mostly works in WordPress. That's not really the kind of programmer you want (at any price).

3. PHP has some nice built-ins for the web - including session/cookie handling, the $_GET and $_POST hashes, etc. However, when I use Python, Ruby, or Java, I get these things via a framework (even a microframework). Yes, one of PHP's strengths is that it includes a microframework that handles basic routing, session handling, and request information. However, all of that is available in other languages.

4. Whether it's Django, Rails, or another framework, I find that an error in one request doesn't propagate to the next. It's interesting how the author hedges and says, "well, when it does get borked, it's your fault rather than PHP's". So, PHP never fails for more than one request, unless it does in which case it's your fault. That's hard to argue against since it doesn't mean anything.

5. None of PHP's frameworks seem as mature as those available in Python, Ruby, C#, and Java and I think part of it is due to the fact that PHP is by itself a microframework.

6. PHP.net does have great docs and they're all nicely in a prominent location. However, one really needs better docs to compensate for poor design. For example, when dealing with PHP strings, do you put the needle or the haystack first? The answer is that it depends on the function. preg_match is needle first, strstr is haystack first. That brings up another inconsistency: should words be separated by an underscore? The answer is again that it depends. Every language has its warts, but PHP is known for being inconsistent.

7. PHP does have a bunch written about it, but it also has a lot of noise. There's a lot written by people who don't quite know what they're doing, but were able to cut and paste code and futz until it worked.

8. The same could be said of almost any community. It's easy to say that there's always people to help since it can't be quantified or argued against.

9. PHP does have good support for many things, but it lacks a modules system. Python has PyPI, Ruby has RubyGems, Java has Maven, and Perl has CPAN. PHP does support a lot of things, but you've provided no evidence that it supports more things than any other language (MongoDB, Pusher, and memcached are supported in many languages and those are the only things you used as examples).

10. Many languages are dynamically typed, but PHP is also weakly typed. Sometimes this is fine, but it can also be a pain and introduce subtle bugs from implicit type casting.

11. I think that many of us have chosen other languages because we believe we get things done faster in them. Writing an application isn't just getting the proof of concept out the door. It's about long-term productivity.

If you like PHP, great for you! I hope you're productive and enjoy using it. However, none of these reasons really ring as valid. PHP is not more scalable. PHP includes a microframework that you don't have to choose beyond the language, but that's not really something that interesting given that frameworks exist for most languages. Via a library, most languages have as good support for the web as PHP has - sometimes better (in my opinion). And the idea that PHP's popularity on the low end makes it an attractive option just seems like a bad argument.

Finally, the author says that PHP is where it's at for the web for the next 5 years (at least). However, what is launching around now and using PHP? Instagram was Python (Django). Quora wasn't PHP. FriendFeed was Python and Facebook seems to have moved away from PHP except for its legacy front-end. Google, Microsoft, and Apple don't use PHP. Pinterest is Python and Django. Twitter is a mix of Ruby and Scala. Github is Rails, BitBucket is Django. Groupon is Rails. Again, just because someone else is doing something isn't a reason to do it. However, if the author is arguing that PHP is the language of the next 5 years, I'd argue that it isn't the language of today.

When Facebook launched, Rails and Django didn't exist; .NET MVC didn't exist; Play! didn't exist. In some ways, Facebook seems to be the last big pre-Rails site. That doesn't mean that newer sites always use frameworks (or that some frameworks didn't exist before then). However, new and popular frameworks burst onto the scene in 2004 and 2005. It changed our web development community. Since that time, I think we've seen new projects using other languages a lot more than PHP. Again, I can't emphasize enough that just because someone is doing something doesn't make it good for you. However, if the author is going to claim that PHP is the language of the day, I'm going to refute it. That doesn't mean that you can't build good things with PHP, but I think that a lot of us are using other tools.

1. Until you hit facebook levels and have to write your own interpreter.

2. Sure, but your code will also suck and be hard to maintain.

3. Nonsense. You might as well say that everyone should use C because it was the first language with a TCP socket API.

4. Nonsense. You can fuck up royally in any language.

5. Irrelevant. The only framework that matters is the one you end up using. Pick a good one and stick with it.

6. For some valuation of "best". Other popular web frameworks and languages also have very good documentation. I'll give PHP the benefit of the doubt on this one, since I don't really know.

7. Again, lots of blogs for other languages too. Also, many PHP blogs are full of shit code (as are many other blogs). Generally, you know what you're doing or you don't. Unless you're reading a type theory blog, you're not going to magically become a good programmer by reading blogs.

8. No experience with PHP's community, but again, lots of other languages have good communities.

9. Lots of other languages integrate with everything too. These last four bullet points aren't really "PHP is good" but just "popular languages have lots of libraries", i.e. tautologies.

10. Heh.

11. So does everything else. Not a strong point in PHP's favor.

Color me unconvinced.

"1. PHP is stupid easy to scale...shared nothing"

How is that a language-level feature? Unless the comparison is to framework level features like ASP.NET Session State, but PHP would only work around that by using memcached or something, right? Or is this referring to the fact that I can't have shared variables at all, so I can't cache super common data structures in a local piece of RAM?

"2. I won’t need experts" - It must be nice, if boring, to be working on really simple codebases where anyone that can hack PHP can work on your application.

"10. Dynamic typing" - There are plenty of neat reasons for dynamic typing, like easy metaprogramming and whatnot. Having crazy type coercion isn't one of them. And "HTTP is untyped so should PHP"; I'm not sure what to make of this.

This goes along with "11. It plain works" -- yea, depends on how you define works. "A lot of that is based on “assumptions” (or shortcuts) that PHP takes to solve a problem. Most often those shortcuts work, and the workarounds are very easy to implement (I’m thinking mainly about strict type checking here)."

And that's the real issue that I can see with PHP. Sometimes, some stuff might sorta make sense, and the rest of the time you're in this weird "gotcha" land, with the inconsistent API and language design.

The only compelling reason I've seen for using PHP is "well, pretty much every server has it installed, and it's super easy to get working with a webserver". PHP seems to surpass everything else in that particular area. Apart from that, come on...

For HN, this is a majorly linkbait-ey title.

Now that that's out of the way, this is a pretty spot on article. I find it very interesting that points brought up against PHP (weak typing, easy to write swiss cheese security code, framework overload) are generally it's greatest strengths as well.

Let's take the weak typing issue for example: Sorry, you should be keeping track of your variables. If you can't do this, then just define your own object and use it. I do this with just about all return types now; it's pretty nice to always know what type of variable you're going to be dealing with on the other side of your MVC. The worst thing that comes from this issue (which exists in every weakly typed language) is improper use of comparison operators (!= vs. !==, == vs. ===). Again, this is up to the developer.

PHP will give you the lumber and the rope, but it's up to the developer if you hang yourself or manage to build a galleon. Personally, I love having the option of total control with the risk of total destruction.

"Dynamic typing – But how do you know if you’re working with an int or a string? By using your brain. HTTP does not do typing and so PHP does not do (strong) typing for scalars"

If you are going to defend dynamic typing (which, by the way, I have no problem with), at least try to bring better arguments. First of all, we can do everything just "by using our brains". Why the hell write programs at all then? Let's just use our brains!

Static type checking is a task that can be automated, compilers have been doing that for years, and it saves our asses from a lot of dumb bugs by making bad code fail as early as possible - at compile time. When you throw that away, you better have a good reason for doing so. "HTTP does no typing" is definitely not a good reason.

"Dynamic typing significantly reduces the amount of code you need to write" - only if you want your code to eventually surprise you with a subtle type-related bug.

I don't agree with much of this, but I consider 6 & 7 to be php's great weakness. The signal to noise ratio is awful. There is so much garbage "docs" and examples that it is hard to find dependable sources. Search for python or ruby help and you can be reasonably confident that what you find isn't going to blow up in you face. This is the cost of being so popular with amateurs and semipros

It's difficult to take articles about languages like this seriously without the author demonstrating some knowledge of other more and less powerful languages. That way they at least have some idea of where they sit on the blub spectrum:

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

I find it amusing that "PHP is stupid easy to scale..." but his site is overloaded right now.

> Best documentation on the web

No, no, no. Poorly or completely undocumented parameters, the "comments" being seen as replacement for coherent examples ... I'm not sure if the author is joking or did actually never look at the documentation of other languages like Python's.

I'll give you the one good reason to use PHP: Everyone and their dog offers PHP hosting for pennies a month. It's just there. It's the Windows of programming languages. You can distribute something like phpBB or MediaWiki and any doofus webmaster will have some understanding of how to install it and stuff the data into the shared MySQL database next door.

So if that's your target audience, or if you're happy sitting around on Dreamhost setting up your site's shopping cart as quickly as reasonable and then doing better nontechnical things, fine. Use PHP. Pray you don't get hacked, but you'll probably be praying in any language at that scale.

If you're out to sell technology or something, or handling real business (like, millions of dollars) with your website, there are probably better ways to build a long-lived robust technical solution, and most people here would appreciate it.

PHP is a terrible language in which you can easily write code that will run basically anywhere. There are many cases (i.e. open source web apps) where the value of the latter vastly outweighs the former, but it's not going to be true for everyone.

I was fully expecting this to be satire.

I'm not sure who this post is aimed at. I hope it wasn't developers, for his sake. He's basically saying that a) he's only interested in hiring dim people and b) smart people moody and easily bored. Good luck recruiting people with that pitch. Eesh.

The website died...I guess PHP is not that "stupid easy to scale" after all...

The second point could have been a lot less offensive and inflammatory if the author just said "it's cheaper."

12. If your startup can only afford 16 year old wanna be hackers you will have no problem finding them.

Someone please copypasta, the blogger seems to have used his bandwidth allowance.

A lot of these could surely be argued reasons not to use PHP.

Site seems down :/

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